Abstract

The increasing dependence of the Indian government on spatial containment, which effectively pushes public protests to out-of-the-way, ‘designated’ places like Jantar Mantar according to preventive measures outlined in Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (now Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023),[i] has led to the silencing of dissent. Using the frequent controversies about the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) as its empirical foundation, this paper analyses how spatial control affects the political agency of aspiring students who are working to hold the National Testing Agency (NTA) and Ministry of Education responsible. The study draws on John Rawls’ First Principle of Equal Liberty, Difference Principle, and ideas on Public Reason, stating how spatial displacement creates a misleading comparison between formal liberty to assemble and the usefulness of that liberty for the individuals who actually possess it. The removal of weak political actors from the purview of power creates barriers to the fair distribution of chances and fair procedural justice. In the conclusion, the paper proposes a “doctrine of spatial proportionality” which should be applied in constitutional adjudication in India.

The Cartography of Contestation

Since 2024, the NEET-UG examination, the only entry point to undergraduate medical courses in India, taken by over twenty-two lakh students each year[ii] — has often been a stage for institutional failings. Allegations of question paper leaks, strange answer keys, and mysterious grace marks have resulted in protests by students across the country, from sit-ins outside NTA’s head office to indefinite hunger strikes at Jantar Mantar.[iii] The government does not actually suppress dissent but merely shifts the locations of protests: students are permitted to hold protests as long as they are at an appropriate distance from Parliament, the Ministry of Education, or the NTA — the very offices whose decisions they are protesting against.

Therefore, the issue is not whether protests are allowed based on Indian law, but whether the administrative geography that places restrictions on protests (such as barriers, prohibitory orders and limited “protest enclaves”) diverts dissent away from the intended audience. The courts in India have accepted these above restrictions as neutral “time, place and manner” restrictions, a concept apparently taken from US jurisprudence, not realising the bigger harm that is the loss of the power to express opinions and (according to Rawls) lack of justice. Drawing on an idea based on Rawls’ theory, the authors of this article are interested in finding out whether the physical restrictions imposed upon the protesters. These tools will be useful to find out whether there are any just political limits on this matter.

The Geography of Silence: Spatial Constraints and the Geometries of State Control

Containment is carried out through a well-known administrative toolbox: preventive notices to prohibit assembly in a limited geographical area, swift perimeter policing and the diversion of all protest activities to sites such as Jantar Mantar and Ramlila Maidan which have received the consent of the authorities. In the case of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India,[iv] the Supreme Court invalidated an indefinite, continuously extended order of Section 144 that prohibited assembly in any part of the centre of Delhi, ruling that peaceful protests are protected by Article 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b)[v] and thus cannot be banned altogether, but may merely be subject to reasonable restrictions. The Court’s solution, however, is spatial in nature by stating minimum boundaries from the Parliament House, the Secretariat blocks and houses of VIPs that cannot be violated by protests. The decision thus cancels the absolute prohibition, while introducing an even more subtle form of exclusion: a geographical border between protestors and the site of actual power.

The aforementioned distinction is critical for prospective NEET candidates. A protest at Jantar Mantar is not the same, in terms of communication, as a protest at the gates of the NTA or the Ministry. Jantar Mantar is a site of protest that has become acceptable to the state exactly because it is far away from real decision-makers. The media ignores protests at Jantar Mantar like sounds in the background, and the distance between the protest site and the decision-makers ensures that grievances reach only filtered, and in any case unheard, channels of communication. When the paper-leak incident of 2024 forced the National Students’ Union of India to march on the NTA, the communication aspect of this protest was that it could not have been achieved at Jantar Mantar (the distance was eliminated).[vi] The state reacted to the protest not by treating it like transport logistics management but by producing a sanitized public space where the state listens on its terms.

Phantom Liberty: A Rawlsian Critique of “Permitted” Speech

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls makes an important difference between liberty and the value of liberty.[vii] According to the First Principle, every individual is entitled to their right to a broad range of basic liberties that can coexist with the liberty of others; this includes one’s rights to assemble or express themselves. However, the notion of liberty is different from its value: liberty is the formality of rights, while their value is how well individuals can put these rights into practice in order to achieve their goals. A right to assemble that can be exercised only from a safe distance from any place of power is a right with no real value to the bearer.

The difference demonstrates what can be called fictitious freedom. The Equal Liberty Principle is violated not through the direct prohibition of the right to protest but through the unequal position of state representatives, who have unfettered access to the conversations they are part of, while student protesters do not have such access. The belief that a “designated protest space” satisfies the obligations of the state under Article 19(1)(b) considers space to be irrelevant to freedom when, in reality, space is a key factor in deciding whether freedom carries any political importance.

Behind the Veil of Vulnerability: NEET Aspirants, Systemic Failure, and the Difference Principle

The original position created by Rawls seeks to know what rules individuals who are equal and free will choose and why, provided they do not know their position in society. The NEET applicants are in the unique position of great vulnerability that reflects this idea because many of them come from families that expend a disproportionate number of resources on coaching; they also suffer from considerable regional and socio-economic differences when it comes to preparation. Moreover, they deal with the pressure of one test, which plays a crucial role in the admission to medical education, where over two million competitors fight for a small number of seats. Reports on the ramifications of the controversy of 2024, including deaths of students as a result of stress from tests being cancelled and rescheduled,[viii] demonstrate how extreme this situation is.

The Difference Principle says that social and economic inequalities may be considered just only if they provide some profits to the least advantaged people of the society. If we look at the situation from a spatial point of view, the suppression of student protests does the opposite: it conceals the various state failures (for example, including the alleged leaking of examination papers, the uncertainty around the use of grace marks, and the delay in publishing results) that create problems for aspirants who have the fewest means to cope with a year of wasted education. For instance, while a rich aspirant might afford to retake a year, someone who belongs to a less privileged background would not be able to afford losing a year of their education.

The containment brings with it the violation of procedural fairness. Institutional ignorance – the NTA’s first denial of irregularities and later half-hearted acknowledgments and the gradual release of the reasons for grace marks – flourishes because of the spatial distance that prohibits a face-to-face public confrontation. Procedural justice requires those subjected to the exercise of institutional power be able to legitimately challenge its application before the institution executing it. A geographical, routine place may give the impression of such an opportunity, but it falls short of truly supplying it.

Public Reason at the Barricades: Justifying Student Disobedience Against Spatial Enclosure

Rawls’s conception of civil disobedience involves the act of breaking the law publicly, peacefully, and deliberately in order to deliver the message of injustice to the majority. His theory is based on a working system of public reason, where institutions are expected to communicate their actions in a way that all citizens can accept. In ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, Rawls identifies reciprocity as the fundamental requirement for legitimizing political authority.[ix] It is important to note here that, by not communicating effectively in crisis situations of their own making, such as an alleged exam leak or a mysterious scoring irregularity, the institutions fail to comply with the requirement of reciprocity, thus bringing minimal moral weight to the confinement.

According to this reasoning, activities disregarding established borders between areas, like students assembling outside exam locations and marching towards the NTA instead of gathering at Jantar Mantar, represent not just a violation of public order, but also a mode of disobedience in line with the views of Rawls and aimed to bring back the principle of mutuality to the society at a time when institutions fail to apply the principle. It should be noted that this phrase does not imply that every transgression of spatial order is acceptable despite any behaviour by the individuals involved.

Reimagining Constitutional Limits in the Digital and Spatial Age

Inadequate directional responses to the tensions emerge from Indian jurisprudence. Indian jurisprudence adopted the idea that the right to meet on public spaces is constitutional after a ruling in a case of Himmat Lal K. Shah v. Commissioner of Police,[x] when the Supreme Court ruled that a state has no right to declare roads inaccessible for meetings. A case triggered by the eviction of Ramdev’s followers in Re: Ramlila Maidan Incident[xi] involved balancing Article 19 freedoms with public order and police excesses, but the ruling remained based on whether the state decision was simply appropriate or not rather than on whether it corresponds to communicative qualities of other sites. Despite the distance-based regulatory model introduced in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan,[xii] there was no effort to determine the value of the model as a hindrance to effective communication. Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India[xiii] is a court ruling based on internet bans in Jammu and Kashmir and can serve as a better example of the structure.

The author of this paper provides us with the concept of applying Anuradha Bhasin’s proportionality principle[xiv] to create the concept of spatial proportionality capable of regulating protests. Instead of using the existing polar positions of either a total prohibition of protests or a permit for protests in specific urban territories, the courts should analyse whether a spatial limitation eliminates the effect of protest message for the audience it targets, which in this case is the National Testing Agency and the Ministry of Education, as well as whether the legitimate public order could be secured in less restrictive way. This approach would redefine the public road and administrative offices as the places that facilitate democratic debate and were carrying out protests would be regulated by the right provided by the Article 19(1)(b), not as the right granted by the executive as a privilege.

Conclusion: Unbounding the Voice of the Aspirant

Examining the spatial restrictions imposed on dissent by NEET applicants reveals that this containment is not merely a straightforward accommodation but a devastating injustice. For citizens who already suffer from systemic vulnerability, such a predicament further diminishes the value of political rights. The appearance of institutional uncertainty thus protected by the suppression of dissent is therefore offset by the lack of accountability brought on by dissent in the political space. A state that allows freedom of speech only in a sanitised format is not an upholder of freedom of dissent; rather, it only shifts the burden of responsibility away. In order to properly measure liberty, one should examine the utility of political freedom to those who have it. These rights should be no longer viewed merely as an abstract legal norm; rather, one must examine whether the protest site is indeed separate from the site of power.

[i]Code of Criminal Procedure 1973, s 144; Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023, s 163.

[ii]Vagisha Kaushik, ‘NEET 2024: Paper Leaks, Arrests, Online Exam, Student Protests, Parliament Debate; The Story So Far’ (Careers360, 3 July 2024) <https://news.careers360.com/neet-2024-paper-leaks-supreme-court-cases-arrests-student-protests-new-nta-chief-re-exam-parliament-debate-cbi-probe-story-so-far> accessed 23 August 2026.

[iii]“Alivia Mukherjee, “NEET Result 2024 Controversy: SFI, AISA, Other Outfits Protest ‘Corruption’ in Results; Want NTA Scrapped” (Careers360, 10 June 2024) <https://news.careers360.com/neet-result-2024-controversy-student-groups-demand-scrapping-of-nta-protest-against-corruption-in-results> accessed 23 August 2026; Alivia Mukherjee, “NEET Controversy: NSUI Protests at Jantar Mantar, Demands Ban on NTA, Re-exam” (Careers360, 24 June 2024) <https://news.careers360.com/neet-controversy-nsui-protests-at-jantar-mantar-demands-ban-on-nta-re-exam> accessed 23 August 2026”.

[iv]Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v Union of India (2018) 17 SCC 324 (SC).

[v]Constitution of India, art 19(1)(a), art 19(1)(b).

[vi]“Anu Parthiban, ‘‘Shut Down NTA’: NSUI Barge into NTA Office, Demand Its Closure over NEET, CUET UG Controversy” (Careers360, 27 June 2024) <https://news.careers360.com/neet-cuet-ug-shut-down-nta-nsui-members-barge-office-demand-its-closure-controversy-paper-leak> accessed 23 August 2026; Press Trust of India, “NEET UG Row: Over Dozen Students Detained While Attempting to March towards Parliament” (Careers360, 2 July 2024) <https://news.careers360.com/neet-ug-row-over-dozen-students-detained-while-attempting-march-towards-parliament> accessed 23 August 2026.”

[vii]John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press 1971).

[viii]“Come Back, My Son’: Indian Exam Leak Leaves Trail of Death, Despair, Anger’ Al Jazeera (28 May 2026) <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/26/come-back-my-son-indian-exam-leak-leaves-trail-of-death-despair-anger> accessed 23 August 2026”.

[ix]“John Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ (1997) 64 University of Chicago Law Review 765, 767.”

[x]Himmat Lal K Shah v Commissioner of Police (1973) 1 SCC 227 (SC).

[xi]In Re: Ramlila Maidan Incident (2012) 5 SCC 1 (SC).

[xii]Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (n 4).

[xiii]Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India (2020) 3 SCC 637 (SC).

[xiv]Anuradha Bhasin (n 13).